John Wayne Gacy Series ‘Devil in Disguise’ Is No Ordinary Serial-Killer Drama
Published on Vanityfair.com
Severance’s Michael Chernus reveals why he signed on for the show despite initial misgivings—and what it took to tell such a horrific, disturbing story the right way.
Michael Chernus has starred on some of the most acclaimed series of the last decade-plus, including Orange Is the New Black and Severance, playing a specific sort of supporting role: often goofy, occasionally schlubby, rarely taken seriously. In 20 years the Juilliard graduate had never played the lead onscreen. That changed when he was offered the title role in a Peacock series called Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy.
Initially, Chernus was not interested. He didn’t want to take a meeting. He felt ready to play a lead—just not as one of the most infamous serial killers in American history. “Absolutely in no way did I want to be a part of something that was glorifying John Gacy,” the actor says. “I didn’t want to be involved in something that was gratuitously showing graphic violence or sexual assault.” He’d seen other serial-killer shows fall into that trap, though he declines to name names, saying, “The victims, if they’re named at all, only [appear] in their relation to the person who perpetrated the crimes.”
After his agent pushed him to reconsider, Chernus still met with writer and producer Patrick Macmanus, a veteran of true-crime series (Dr. Death, The Girl From Plainville). There, he learned that Macmanus’s vision matched his own. “He said to me, ‘Gacy’s not going to be at the center of this, so you won’t be in every scene.’ And to me that was such a huge relief,” Chernus says. “That’s where some of my experience as a supporting actor really came into this. I didn’t feel like it had to be all about me or about my character. With this story, I didn’t want it to be.”
For the record, Macmanus didn’t want to make a Gacy show either at first; he actually said no to the project two times. Universal was developing its adaptation of the hit docuseries John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise in 2022, during a time when Ryan Murphy’s Dahmer—Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story was setting ratings records on Netflix. However, the series was also being sharply criticized by relatives of multiple victims it depicted. “I honestly didn’t want this to be Dahmer,” Macmanus says. “And truth be told, at the time, I didn’t really know how to make it anything but that.” (“I want to go on the record as saying I’m a huge personal fan of Ryan Murphy’s and what he does and how he does it,” Macmanus adds.)
Eventually, Macmanus was assured that he could make the show his way—which meant unlearning the lessons of his own past successes. “My career will constantly be evolving from trying to take a hard look at my failings,” he says. Macmanus regrets not focusing more on the victims in those past projects. With Devil in Disguise, he and his writers decided to shift gears. “We really, truly were trying to figure out a way to focus on the victims—what their lives were like and who they truly were, with no connective tissue to John Wayne Gacy at all,” Macmanus says. “The ultimate goal was to ensure that when people left our show, they saw more than a name. They saw more than a number. They saw more than a life associated with this horrendous tragedy, with this absolutely evil man.”